It's that thing we say automatically when we love a painting or a poem or a dancer's performance: That was beautiful.

But what do we mean? What is beauty in art and how do we receive and comprehend it? How does it register in a culture that has grown increasingly ironic and skeptical about the images and visions it creates?

A number of art critics have been beetling their brows over the nature and meaning of beauty for the past decade or so. In the wake of 20th century movements (Minimalism, conceptual art) that stressed a work's emotional and intellectual content over visual allure, writers like Dave Hickey, Arthur C. Danto and poet Kenneth Koch have struggled to reassess and redefine beauty in new contexts.

Splendor had become suspect. Beauty demands dissection.

"Lovely & Amazing," a beguiling new ensemble film about a yearning mother (Brenda Blethyn) and her three dissatisfied daughters, explores the quest for elusive beauty in a nuanced human key. In doing so, it reminds us how artists and critics both can deepen our understanding of what's considered beautiful, what that can signify and how it can take us by surprise.

John Keats discovered Western culture's dominant motto on the subject in his 1819 "Ode on a Grecian Urn." The Romantic notion that "Beauty is truth" and "truth beauty," as the poet wrote, has held up pretty well and still serves for wide general purposes.

We tend to believe that the things we find beautiful -- a piece of music, a mountain landscape at dawn, Tiger Woods' golf swing -- have an intrinsic worth,

an inner, if unmeasurable, verity. (OK, the merit of Woods' swing might have its yardstick, in the PGA winnings list.)

We also reserve a pretty healthy measure of distance, a wary, irony-laced mistrust of things that seem too ravishing on the surface. Advertisements, after all, can be gorgeous. The line between art and fashion photography is hopelessly blurred.

Everything from philosophy and politics to art market forces and psychology is invoked in a worthy collection of critical essays, "Uncontrollable Beauty" (Allworth Press). James Hillman argues that a culture fixated on introspection and almost compulsively open about "violence, misogyny, sexuality, childhood, emotions and feeling" may actually be repressing beauty. Danto concludes his musings on Robert Motherwell and activist art with this storm warning: "So Beauty may be in for rather a long exile."

Peter Schjeldahl, in his intuitive "Notes on Beauty," makes this canny point about the way we react to exquisiteness: "Experiences of beauty are sometimes attended by soaring hopes, such as that beauty must some day, or even immediately, heal humanity's wounds and rancors. It does no such thing, of course."

Those hopes -- earnest, half formed and comically burbling -- are the characters' wellsprings in "Lovely & Amazing." The story is loosely organized around a mother's decision to improve her life by liposuction. Her quixotic fancy is futile -- she's still aging; her doctor isn't flirting with her, as Blethyn's character imagines. Beauty and all its imagined blessings can't be that easy.

It certainly isn't easy for her thwarted daughter Michelle, who makes tiny chair sculptures that nobody wants. In a finely drawn and sympathetic performance of an unappealing character, Catherine Keener plays a noodling half-artist too buried in herself to grasp what's beautiful around her. Her sister Elizabeth (Emily Mortimer), a would-be film actress, is trapped in a different kind of self-absorption, worrying if her body is lovely and sexy enough for the screen.

In the film's most dreadfully fascinating scene, Elizabeth hops out of bed nude after sleeping with a smug actor (Dermot Mulroney) and insists that he assess her like a piece of sculpture. Detail by detail he obliges: "In a perfect world your ass would be rounder."

In this decidedly imperfect world, the film's real beauty catches Michelle off guard. It happens at McDonald's, after her adoptive young sister Annie (Raven Goodwin) has run away from home and she, Michelle, has been arrested in a particularly humiliating way. "Do you like my straight hair?" Annie asks, in the midst of their separate woes.

The sheer incongruous fact of the question, the irrepressible throb an 8- year-old girl feels to be and be seen as beautiful, breaks through to the miserable Michelle and startles her awake. A wonderful glow steals over her face, a light found where and when it was least expected.

Twice this summer, I've been caught up short myself, ambushed by something beautiful I didn't see coming. It happened first at the Opera House, right after Ruth Ann Swenson spun gold in Cleopatra's famously voluptuous "V'adoro, pupille" aria, in Handel's "Giulio Cesare."

Then, in an opera I thought I knew from my recording of it, David Daniels heard a violin obbligato bird. The chirping string melody set his Cesare off on "Se in fiorito almeno prato," an utterly ravishing duet for man and orchestral bird altogether new to me. Handel's "pleasant flowery meadow" is 278 years old. I, like many other listeners, I imagine, visited this gorgeous place for the first time.

On a recent late afternoon visit to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford, I bolted through the touring "Uncommon Legacies" exhibition of American Indian art. One thing after another -- a brilliantly beaded Choctaw sash, an almost abstract Pawtucket bear sculpture in black basalt, a well-worn Northern Plains buffalo robe -- looked especially captivating. That time was fleeting made the beauty of these objects seem more precious.

I dashed upstairs with the guards in purposeful pursuit. "The museum's closing," they intoned. I checked out the Arnesons and a Diebenkorn and made it to a final gallery.

There, a vertiginous swirl of color, was Joseph Raphael's "Flowering Fruit Trees." I'd never seen the painting before, and right away it looked deeply familiar. I spent my waning minutes that day in front of it, startled, excited and content.

"Nothing in itself," Schjeldahl writes, "beauty may be a mental solvent that dissolves something else, melting it into radiance."